It’s back to school season, and that means college women are being bombarded with the annual barrage of advice on avoiding sexual assault and rape. Colleges and universities have been holding potential victims of rape responsible for preventing attacks since they first recognized the problem. Well, the high rate of sexual assault and rape on college campuses is not the only problem – the misguided prevention efforts target the wrong group of people and have not reduced incidents of sexual assault or rape.
I am completely on board with Jaclyn Friedman, who argues in The American Prospect that we should be teaching men how to avoid being rapists, rather than policing young women and engaging in “ineffective pageantry” on prevention. As gender violence educator Jackson Katz says, “violence against women is a men’s issue.”
It’s not just about teaching men and boys that rape is wrong. Most people know rape is wrong. But they don’t usually know what constitutes “rape” and they don’t hold their peers accountable for it. They think rape is a strange masked man jumping out of the bushes onto a woman. They don’t necessarily think it’s rape when they lock their study partner in the room and force themselves on her while she cries. They think penetrating an unconscious woman is “taking advantage,” but they do not always consider it rape.
So-called “bystander intervention” is a very important component of effective prevention. Dr. John D. Foubert, of Oklahoma State University, began a sexual assault prevention program in the 90′s. He primarily focuses on changing men’s behavior; three years ago he began a women’s program as well. This article describes his techniques and the outcomes. How amazing would it be if every college campus did something like this? If you are in college or affiliated with one in some way, what does “rape prevention” look like on your campus (if there’s anything at all)?
In the meantime, I love these Sexual Assault Prevention Tips Guaranteed to Work.
This makes me think of the uproar on Jez when Observe and Report was released. I was appalled how many people were defending the infamous scene as “not rape” because the character slurred her consent while half passed out. MANY people are ignorant as to what constitutes rape, clearly we are not doing a good enough job educating people about this.
Nothing at all at my NYC (mostly) commuter school, though it might be different for the few who live in the dorms.
At my school, we do the following:
-Mandatory workshop on sexual assault prevention for all freshman during orientation (if I remember correctly, this did include some emphasis on men’s responsibility not to assault)
-Presence of sexual assault response team that posts their phone numbers all over campus and little cards talking about how when you hook up with someone, both parties should make their expectations clear, trust your instincts, etc.
-Yearly exhibition of art created by survivors/victims.
I get the sense that, although there are incidents of sexual assault here, the campus at large doesn’t consider it to be a huge problem. I’ve known a couple of women who’ve been assaulted while I was here. One worked with a dean to get therapy/closure and last I heard had decided not to press charges (she was drunk at the time). The other was raped while immobilized on pain meds, reported it immediately, and the guy was expelled 2-3 days afterwards, after interviews with the cops. So the response, as far as I can tell, is sound. But there’s not a ton of discourse of the “men: this is your problem” style.
When I was in college, I vaguely remember some talk from a Dean that included the cheer “stop, don’t touch me there, these are my private squares” and the passing out of magnets telling us what to do if we were sexually assaulted. I don’t remember much talk of rape prevention. Surprise, surprise, I was raped on that campus.
Now I work on a college campus, and I’m not particularly plugged into orientation activities beyond what my own dept. does. However, I did see an ad in the local alt weekly’s “college issue” from the city police that at least began to address the responsibility of men NOT to be rapists. I just wish they’d left out the first part of the ad: http://erniebufflo.wordpress.com/2009/08/21/finally-a-decent-psa/
private squares??? the hell?
Oh yes. With hand motions to boot.
That just seems like a callback to the, “you don’t have to talk about the parts” sex-ed ad mentioned earlier this week. God. Can we all grow the fuck up as a society?
Ugh! A silly song and dance about saying “no.” No accompanying lesson re: hearing “no.”
Or say, any mention of what happens if she’s too out of it to SAY no.
At my college all varsity athletes (big shocker, I was a college athlete) had to attend a whole boatload of 1-2 hour sessions on a variety of topics. The rape one was kind of interesting because it very specifically focused on our responsibility as men to not rape. Basically the guidance we got was: when in doubt, don’t and No means no.
It would be great if all schools (high-school and colleges) would bring in the 1-in-4 people to lecture (http://www.oneinfourusa.org/). They do a fantastic job of explaining what rape is like, from a male perspective.
The one I went to they showed a longer version of this video which shows to guys just how bad rape is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uae_SOMCS_A
The video isn’t perfect, it talks about rape by strangers, but that and the talk the 1-in-4 group does I think really gets through to guys just how awful rape is.
I know their lecture will probably stay with me for the rest of my life.
We were given rape whistles. I still have mine, somewhere…
I wish more schools would focus on anti-rape programs for men from a law-enforcement standpoint, i.e. “rape is a crime and you will be branded a sex offender and go to jail.”
Rape is generally treated as a social problem within college campuses, but not a law-enforcement one. Just because college-age victims usually know their rapists doesn’t make their actions any less criminal than if they were strangers who’d dragged those women into an alley.
I went to a women’s undergrad college, and I can’t remember the rape talk we must have gotten. We did get rape whistles. But because it was an all-female audience, I can’t imagine there was anything that was directed at men.
As for my graduate university (SUNY at Buffalo), I’ve been incredibly impressed at their anti-rape work. There’s a woman in charge of the anti-rape task force–someone paid by the university, I mean. Then there is a men’s group, meant to talk about what masculinity means on college campuses and how to be good men who don’t rape people. The chief of police is very keyed in on the abysmally low number of rape reports they get (single digits in a school of almost 30,000 people). From what I can gather, as a grad student and someone who lives off campus and who wasn’t given any “welcome to college” talks when I started, they target the men in terms of rape prevention, but they heavily target the women in terms of what to do if you or someone you know is raped. Like, making it easy to get health care, making it easy to report it to the police (including, I think, having a specific team or wing of the campus police department trained on sexual assault). The police really want people to feel comfortable reporting assault to them, especially given the reputation of the school for partying, frats, lots of drinking and stuff. That’s why they hired someone for sexual assault awareness–to figure out how to prevent rape, but also (given the inability to prevent all rape in a world designed to make it easy for men to rape, physically and psychologically) to report it. They are more focused on reporting it to the cops right now than they are on prosecuting–saying that you don’t need to prosecute if you tell the police, but that it’s a good idea just in case. Stuff like that.
When I learned about it, after emailing the chief of police and promptly getting a personal email back from him, directing me to websites about their efforts and cc-ing the sexual assault prevention woman, I was totally fucking floored at how proactive they were. It came as a really nice surprise.
I’m really impressed with the article you link to about the prevention program at OSU. I love love to see one of their workshops just so I have an idea of how to deal with this issue as my daughter gets older. Does anyone know of any videos or materials that they use that are available to the general public?
@Sarah: As much as it pains me, I agree that we need to do more to educate men about what rape is. A few years ago I read a story in a magazine about a man’s realization, years after the fact, that he was a rapist. He’s picked up a young, foreign woman at a city bar, took her to his house in a suburb, she didn’t speak English well, she had no idea where she was or how to get back to her hotel and he wouldn’t help her, and he kept pressuring her until she eventually “allowed” him to have sex with her. Only afterwards did he help her get back to her hotel. Because she’d ultimately “consented,” because he hadn’t held her down or violently overtaken her, he didn’t recognize what he did as rape. Over the years, however, he came to realize that she hadn’t actually consented; rather, he’d taken advantage of her fear, her helplessness and forced her to do something she otherwise would not have chosen to do. It was a powerful piece, and I wish I’d saved it so that I could hand it out to every man I know. Because when I talk to men about rape, I am always surprised how many of them – good, thoughtful, intelligent guys – believe exactly what you stated: that rape is when a stranger accosts a woman walking alone in a dark parking garage, or in an alley or something. What is so obvious to a woman, what seems as though it should be so obvious to a man too is sometimes not. It can be frustrating, like, why the hell should I have to teach you this?!? But the alternative is to let the ignorance fester.
Not all men are going to agree about what rape is – some probably wouldn’t consider what I recounted above as rape – but at the least those men should have it hammered home that even if they don’t think it’s rape, the law does, and they will be prosecuted (trying to control my cynicism about the law here).
I got a rape whistle in college too. That’s all I remember as far as “rape prevention” goes, and it was really just risk reduction for women.
A guy I was friends with at the time laughed at me for carrying it and told me I was conceited for thinking myself “rape worthy.” That friendship didn’t last.
I don’t remember ANY rape discussion at my undergrad. Just a “Campus Safety” lecture that pointed out who to call if you were being followed on campus after dark or some such. Oh and not to leave your drink unattended.
@B
Aye-fucking-carumba! I wish that video had a little bit more of the lead up in it, but regardless the point hits like an atom bomb. Thanks for sharing.
@ Hill Rat -
Yeah it would be nice if the leadup was on there.
Basically it setups the rape that two guys (with guns I believe) come upon you (a man) in an alley. They force you to give them BJs and then have forced intercourse with you. It also says that the guys have sores on their genetalia. I seem to recall that the guys also threaten that they’re going to go after your family as well.
It also says that the guys have sores on their genetalia.
And now I’m nauseous. Blargh!
@Becky – “Rape is generally treated as a social problem within college campuses, but not a law-enforcement one.”
I agree that this is a problem, but there are a couple contributing factors that make a lot of sense:
1) Acquaintance rapes are much harder to prove in court (as you’re aware, I’m sure). Not that men shouldn’t be told that acquaintance rapes are a crime as well — of course they should be — but the type of rape that happens at college most often is so difficult to prove under our legal framework that in many ways it’s easier to concentrate on other angles. (This is not really morally defensible, but it is pragmatic.)
2) I don’t know how true this is for big universities, but a lot of small colleges like mine try to create an environment that’s basically free of official law enforcement. Drinking, plagiarism, file sharing, etc. are all preferably dealt with in-house. I mean, at the school I go to, you can be smoking weed out on the lawn and our public safety officers will walk right by. I get the feeling that, generally speaking, a lot of colleges try to keep their environments as safe-feeling as possible for the students, and that means safety from the police. Unfortunately, it can decrease students’ safety from other students.
Go Oklahoma!
Ahem. I totally agree that education for men needs to be as widespread as ‘prevention’ lectures are for women. As other commentators have mentioned, you don’t think that ‘good’ guys should have to be told this stuff, but statistically 80+% of rapes are committed by someone known to the victim, clearly, somethings gotta give.
There are a lot of middle-school and high school level co-ed education programs that are happening right now and many school districts are adding dating violence education as mandatory. Oklahoma is actually considering making it a state-wide requirement. Which is good, considering the stats on teen dating violence, violence against women and child abuse; the state has a lot of issues.
Check out Love is Not Abuse (http://www.loveisnotabuse.com)
for some stats that will blow your mind about teen dating violence, especially the influence of technology (like cell phones) on relationships.
/Okie SA advocate
@barqiel: The law should apply on campus as well as in the outside world. I think universities’ need to deal with things “in-house” is left over from when universities were supposed to function in loco parentis. That’s bullshit, IMO. College students are legally adults and then should be subject to the same laws as everyone else–which includes the university’s involving law enforcement when a crime is reported.
I know that many rapes that occur on college campuses would be difficult to prove, and many women might not want to report them because of that, but that shouldn’t stop the university from saying “Rape is a crime. Sex offenders on our campus will be prosecuted.”
In the large state university I went to, when I arrived in 1991 there’d just been (maybe the year before?) a new set of guidelines released on-campus regarding consent, suggesting that consent be explicitly asked for and explicitly given at each stage of physical contact. I never actually saw the guidelines themselves, but I got the impression they didn’t include much discussion or theory.
The people in my (co-ed) dorm found the whole thing quite hilarious, and regularly acted out exaggerated make-out scenes with pauses every few seconds for a “May I touch you here?” “why yes, you may” conversation.
A decade and a half later, I hear about the “Yes Means Yes” anthology and the concept of “enthusiastic consent” and I finally realize that I was incredibly lucky to be in an environment where that sort of thing would be suggested, so long ago. And I’m embarrassed that at the time, I found it as funny as all my peers did.
I have no clue how to get people in their late teens and early twenties to think past their simple assumptions about rape & consent. Too often what we hear is like the guy in @tallgirl-in-heels’s story, where we only figure it out much later.
Tallgirl, that’s chilling. I can’t believe he actually came to that realization (though I’m glad he did).
I’m a resident assistant at the University of Maine, and I love our new bystander intervention program called “I Got Your Back.” It concentrates on building community and respect. It’s focus was at first on injuries and deaths caused by alcohol abuse, but we (the RA’s and the community) have taken our training and applied to issues of sexual assault and education as well. We challenge our residents to be more aware of what rape, assault, and unsafe sex actually are. Challenging stereotypes on these topics is half the job. The other half seems to be making sure people really are invested in looking out for each other, challenging them to be responsible and interdependent citizens. I’m very confident about our new program.
I’ll second the “Go Oklahoma!” And I hope that with such a great program at OSU, the University of Oklahoma has improved their program in the years since I attended. I remember absolutely zero discussion about safety.
@Becky, while I agree with you in some respects, I think part of the problem is precisely that in many guys’ heads, the thought process is something like: “Rape is a serious felony; I’m a nice guy, not a criminal; therefore rape isn’t something that I would ever do or need to think about.” And if you *start* by directly challenging that, they get defensive: “are you saying I’m a criminal?!” etc. It’s hard to make progress from there.
Whereas the article SarahMC linked to above takes the approach of first making rape something that obviously does effect them, if only in a secondary way; by first encouraging empathy with victims, and not triggering the “rape is only something Bad People / Criminals do” reaction, the program has an easier time making a difference. Or so the article claims, and that doesn’t surprise me.
@Sarah: I’m glad he came to the realization, too. I just wish the story had been printed in a magazine aimed at men and not a lady mag. By targeting the story to a primarily female audience, it read more like a cautionary tale (beware ladies, don’t get yourself into a similar situation) instead of an educational tool for other men about what rape is. It’s an unfortunate reflection of the general attitude that rape is a “women’s problem” to be talked about and dealt with by women, even though the reality is that rape will not stop until men stop raping. Period. We need to get men educated and involved.
I agree that intervention is a really effective strategy. Sometimes all it takes is for someone to know you are watching.
I would disagree in part with the Oklahoma article claim that college men become rapists because of fraternities.
“The programs that work best are aimed at fraternities, which are at the heart of the problem. Men who join fraternities don’t have different histories of sexual behavior from those who don’t. The differences develop after they join the frat. Greek cultural norms promote sexual coercion and helping each other get laid. They support the myths that condone rape.”
Sure, there are fraternities that indoctrinate college men into a certain mindset.
But the lies about rape that encourage it are already endemic to the culture. Men in fraternities wouldn’t take to these ideas so easily if they didn’t already kind of believe them.
The most important thing one can gather from this statement is the fact that fraternity members are raised no different from non-fraternity members. They’re just more specifically trained by their “brothers” to rape.
This means that the socialization that most young men get in this country doesn’t really prepare them to treat women as human beings. It doesn’t immunize them against such dangerous beliefs.
It’s great that there are anti-rape programs in colleges, but it’s obviously getting to a lot of men too late if these sick ideas about women and sex always seem to find plenty of fertile ground.
at my previous college (a small women’s college) there were statistics chalked on the sidewalk for Rape Awareness week, copies of The Rapist Checklist posted around campus, and we got the whole “don’t leave your drink unattended” speil.
One irritating thing was the college’s belief that we should fear and avoid all men traveling through campus–which was a little hairy because there was a small number of men that attended the school.
I just transferred to the Savannah College of art and Design, and at my orientation the SCAD security people talked about the self-defencse classes offered. Here’s the kicker: these self-defense classes are women-only. The scad security people are going to get that link that y’all posted.